I had a week in Seville. It rained, I knew it would, so I was prepared. I had a list of museums to visit and a print-out of a prose project. I call it a project because I'm not keen on the term memoir. It sounds pretentious for a start, and given I've had an appalling memory since I was a teenager, it's misleading. So the prose project, one of three, made only a little headway because of other things that were going on while I was away but that's okay. I was away. What was so exciting about Seville was that it felt ambitious. Perhaps a city that's so vulnerable to heat and flooding can be brave. I don't know anything about urban planning, but I loved the easy access to the great river that runs through it, loved what's been done with older buildings. And this picture shows the contemporary art museum - not easy to find but that's another story, perhaps it was me. It's in an old monastery that became a ceramics factory, and is now a place to show contemporary art. Gorgeous, big, rambling almost empty when I went, and with so many different unexpected spaces. In a little courtyard, this business with the vines. I don't know what they are, perhaps jasmine, perhaps passion flower but these are growing, live, curtains you can part and walk through and I imagine when they flower they're probably scented and will sound of insects. It was the first museum I went to and arguably the best. I think I'm spoiled having a daughter in Utrecht because the Dutch are brilliant at museums so I have impossible standards. As for the prose project, it's interesting and challenging to go back more than five decades and try to make sense of who I was then. The key seems to be in stone and trees. At least for starters. I went through the printout sometimes to the sound of flamenco from the flamenco school opposite my Airbnb studio, sometimes to the sound of rain gushing from a broken downpipe. And I understood how much I had to allow myself to fail over and over again as I attempted to put anything in my notebook. I dreaded trying.
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